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When we released our very first game, Game Dev Tycoon yesterday, we did something unusual and as far as I know unique. We released a cracked version of the game ourselves, minutes after opening our Store.... The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail... Slowly their in-game funds dwindle, and new games they create have a high chance to be pirated until their virtual game development company goes bankrupt.

won't the results be skewed now that a "PROPER" crack has been released?
(looking at the legit players vs pirates chart on the blog page)
how will they distinguish legit players, players that downloaded the "rigged" version and pirates that downloaded the cracked "legit" version?

Like any language — English, for example — management-speak can be used “to deflect blame, complicate simple ideas, obscure problems, and perpetuate power relations.” But that is a function of language. And make no mistake: bureaucratese is its own language. Or, to be more precise, its own idiom. Idioms evolve organically among the members of a group sharing common interests and concerns to better communicate those very interests and concerns.... These all necessarily exclude people outside the in-group, but this does not need to be a sinister thing. Try to follow a conversation among particle physicists in the Cal Tech lunchroom one day if you doubt me.

You follow a link to a blog post and if you are lucky the post is there, just as it was the day the author created it. But just as likely, the link is broken and goes nowhere. Or the author has changed the contents (or at least the presentation) or simply moved it to a different place. Blogs are abandoned, services go out of business or are aquired, authors lose interest, lose faith, and sometimes simply die. And although the URL, that universally unique permutation of characters, remains, the content it pointed to is lost. This is only going to get worse.

For the past few months we have seen a gradual increase in server-level compromises. In fact, every week it seems we’re handling half a dozen or so and it continues to increase. It’s one of the reasons that I have started including this as a trend in my most recent Website Security presentations. Just last week we talked about some very sneaky hacks that targeted the Apache binaries directly in the place of the modules, contrary to what we had been seeing. Fortunately, the more sophisticated attack are still far and few in between leaving us to deal with rogue modules more often than not.

Now they're going directory for the Apache binaries. Here's how to stay safe.

The password creation process on different websites can be a bit like visiting foreign countries with unfamiliar social customs. This one requires eight characters; that one lets you have up to 64. This one allows letters and numbers only; that one allows hyphens. This one allows underscores; that one allows @#$&%, but not ^*()[]!—and heaven forbid you try to put a period in there. Sometimes passwords must have a number and at least one capital letter, but no, don’t start the password with the number...

Many successful password attacks have little to do with the content of the password itself.

It seems funny to call the software our conference runs on a "platform" as that sounds very "enterprisey" and official. In the past we've done aspConf and mvcConf with sponsors who helped pay for things. We used Channel 9 and had a studio and streamed either from Seattle or using Live Meeting. However, this year we wanted to do it on the cheap and more distributed. We wanted speakers from ALL over in all time zones. How cheap? About USD$10ish we figure. I'll get a complete bill later, but we basically wanted to scale up, do the talks and scale down.

How to organize your own conference for the price of a take-out lunch.